Outside the Government Final: The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot

Given that The Day of the Doctor was massively successful and immediately catapulted to the top of the “best Doctor Who stories ever” list, it is perhaps no small thing that it was not actually the most beloved piece of the fiftieth anniversary. That honor, of course, goes to the spectacle of Steven Moffat visibly wishing he was sitting in the chair from Terror of the Autons during the botched satellite link-up with One Direction during the BBC Three “afterparty.” But second to the single most sublime moment of television that Steven Moffat has ever provided the world was Peter Davison’s The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot.

It is worth stating, up front, that this is a genuinely sweet and delightful piece of television. It is routinely hilarious, from the brilliant use of the Shada clip to cover Tom Baker’s lack of involvement to the Peter Jackson/Ian McKellen cameo to Sylvester McCoy’s beautiful delivery of “I’d like to go home now” to Steven Moffat playing with action figures in his office to… I mean, this paragraph could go on for quite a bit, couldn’t it? This is a joyous thing chock full of charming moments.

In some ways, actually, that’s the headline. Colin Baker has said in at least one interview that he genuinely was hurt not to be included in Day of the Doctor, especially given that Tom Baker was. This is an old wound, of course - the same one that flared twenty years earlier over the disparity of emphasis in The Dark Dimension. But it’s honestly difficult to imagine that Davison and McCoy didn’t have similar emotions. Of course they were all jealous of Baker and McGann for getting involvement. Wouldn’t anyone be?

And yet this exists, full of warmth and humor and good feelings. On, to be clear, all sides. Moffat is there to send himself up as a disdainful and cantankerous man who has it in for any part of the series he didn’t create. Because, of course, he’d have loved to do The Thirteen Doctors as much as Colin Baker would have loved to be in it. Nobody didn’t want to see all of the classic series Doctors. And perhaps more to the point, in skewering himself so thoroughly, Moffat is tacitly making it clear that he understands Davison, Baker, and McCoy’s disappointments, and, more to the point, is sympathizing with them.

One might, of course, fairly ask why he didn’t just give them parts in the special then. But the reason for that is straightforward: the special still had to, at the end of the day, work as an episode of television and as a narrative. And the available options for trying to craft a narrative featuring all of the Doctors were all, in their own ways, unappealing. Seventy-five minutes is not nearly enough to handle eight leads with their own plot threads - an ensemble of that size needs far more room to breathe. And a chain of cameo appearances would quickly grow dull. It’s an absolute delight when Tom Baker shows up on screen. But if Tom Baker’s appearance were the first (or last) in a chain that went on through the list, it would swiftly become a tedious exercise in box ticking. The strictly episodic nature of that plot is, frankly, dull - just ask anyone who’s read The Eight Doctors. Or imagine the “Doctor’s reward” segment of The End of Time stretched out for an hour. Either will do.

On top of that, once you start going for completism, the necessary gaps become all the more visible. Suddenly you need to come up with a reason why you’re stopping at Tom Baker. Already The Day of the Doctor tangibly had Eccleston’s absence hanging over it, both in conspicuousness of John Hurt and in the obvious but totally ignored question of why the Moment apparently deemed the Doctor’s next incarnation inadequate for the task of preventing the Doctor from using it. Adding more Doctors just makes the ones who aren’t there more conspicuous, much like Tom Baker’s absence quietly dominates The Five Doctors. And, of course, there’s the passage of time - the fact that casting Davison, Baker, and McCoy as the Fifth through Seventh Doctors in 2013 would look like what it was: old men dressing like they’re thirty years younger than they are. Indeed, the fact that this is what happens if you put Davison, Baker, and McCoy in their Doctor costumes (or at least, in their coats thrown over the souvenir t-shirt versions of their costumes) is one of the central jokes of The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot.

Because, of course, the truth is that we didn’t all want the classic Doctors to be cast in the 50th anniversary special. What we wanted was for it to simultaneously be 1988, 1985, 1982, 1976, and for that matter 1973, 1968, and 1964, and to have the Doctors of our youth reborn on screen in all their glory. We wanted the past to still be accessible. We wanted a show about time travel to be capable of it. We wanted an anniversary special that was boundlessly long, and consisted not of cameos but of whole new seasons of all of our favorites. We wanted everything. And instead we live in a world with time, and history, and death.

And the reality is that Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy all know and understand that. They get that Moffat’s job is to create the best Doctor Who he possibly can in 2013, and that at the end of the day he has to go with his creative judgment because he’s the man at the keyboard. They’re all professionals and gentlemen. They understand how art is made, and that the moment you start trying to do something you don’t really believe in is the moment you’re lost. And that’s ultimately what The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot is: everyone involved getting together in a big group hug to show that they understand that this is how it works, and that they’re all still friends.

Which brings us to the most barbed gag in the entire thing - when McCoy stops and asks, why they’re doing this, noting, “I’ve travelled twelve thousand miles to get here, I’m in breach of contract, my film career’s in tatters, and for what,” prompting Baker to ask what the point of this mad folly is. At which point Davison, after a moment’s thought, says, “for the fans,” an answer everyone readily accepts, dismissing all doubt they had about the wisdom of this.

It works on many levels. Part of the joke of the whole piece, after all, is the underlying egotism of their desire to be in the 50th. “For the fans,” then, is used, as it often is, to make a show of altrusim around an altogether more selfish act. This is just as much for the fans as convention appearances and Big Finish audios are, which is to say that the fans are a lovely supplement to a paycheck. Indeed, the fact that what is “for the fans” is more often for the fans’ disposable income goes a long way towards explaining the vast number of stunning misadventures undertaken in the fans’ names. Of course Colin Baker will break into the Roath Lock Studios for the fans. He already did Attack of the Cybermen for them, after all.

But it’s also the case that “the fans” serve as the entire reason The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot exists, and not in an entirely pleasant way. While it is largely about everyone lampooning their own pretensions and ego, the occasion for this lampooning only exists because there are people who are absolutely ludicrously invested in their sense of what The Day of the Doctor should have been. Colin Baker may have admitted to hurt feelings in an interview, but portions of Doctor Who fandom were absolutely seething at the lack of classic Doctors, and were happy to accuse Moffat of egregious disrespect. Just as they were perfectly happy to get angry at him for failing to persuade Eccleston to come back, and, for that matter, perfectly happy to get angry at Eccleston for not understanding that playing the Doctor is actually a life sentence and not, as he might have imagined on the basis of his contract, a nine month gig. The number of genuinely ugly sentiments about this topic that “the fans” have expressed is vast, and while “not all fans” and even “not most fans” are absolutely accurate and solid defenses, the toxic dickheads have their effect.

And yet somehow the inherent ugliness that fuels this doesn’t detract from its fundamental charm. Yes, this exists because of a multi-layered and toxic culture of entitlement and arrogance that, ultimately, absolutely nobody involved with this is actually innocent of participation in, the audience included. And yet it’s fun. It’s a bunch of people from across fifty years of history throwing a party to celebrate both that history and the way in which that history has delivered the present day. And the sheer love of that history and of Doctor Who comes through in every scene and every time that people send up their own pretensions and rough edges. And that’s perhaps the thing that’s worth pointing out. Yes, everybody who does something like this “for the fans” is at the end of the day really doing it for themselves. But then, they’re the fans too, for better and for worse.

But in the case of The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, pretty much entirely for better.

Tom Baker's cameo is really overdetermined, isn't it? He's the longest serving actor (in terms of years on television), the oldest surviving actor, but also the one actor whose performance most visibly hangs over the classic series.Also, one can't imagine the Shada answering phone joke working for any other actor, except perhaps Smith.

That said, I do hope Davison, Baker, and McCoy knew about the cameo (and Night of the Doctor) before they happened.

I believe - although I could be wrong - that they didn't know about Night while planning Five(Ish), and McGann was originally going to have a bigger part in it, which was then dialled down when it became apparent he'd be off doing his own bit instead. And that the Baker cameo in Day came as a complete surprise to all of them upon broadcast.

For all the joys of the 50th Anniversary (and given it's impossible to keep all of the people happy all of the time, it went as well as anyone could have possibly expected) the inclusion of Russell THE Davies is for me the most fundamentally joyful moment of The Five-ish Doctors Reboot. He was noticeably absent from all the hoopla surrounding the anniversary, and perhaps rightly so as he'd moved on, but he's the reason we're still talking about the television series in the present tense and we all owe him an immense debt of gratitude. So to see his little inclusion here, still in the fold and quite happily taking the piss out of himself, is simply wonderful. Thanks Russell!

Tom did announce, about a day or two before the 50th, that he would appear in the episode - but many people just brushed it off as him talking nonsense as usual. As for McGann, yeah, they didn't know but Peter Davison later admitted that it worked quite well with Fiveish because of the line "work permitting, obviously." In hindsight, that's perfect and almost feels planned as a cheeky nod to Night.

Loved this from the second I saw it. In fact, I'm certain I've seen it more than "Day of the Doctor." The entire "F(ish) Doctors" Twitter tease was such fun. If anyone has ever seen Peter Davison's taped messages to Los Angeles Gallifrey convention (one year he missed it and the next he was there) will see them very similar to prequels. Davison's self-deprecating sense of humor is stamped all over this thing while the contributions of everyone else cannot be understated.

Obviously, it is tempting to just list all the classic moments or even your favorites, so I will merely point out that the 3 Doctors present make a fine comedy team. Given it was Peter's script, it is kind of funny to let Baker and McCoy be like a tiny chorus of sanity (however slight that grip might be) against Davison's blind mania ... most noticeable in that Davison believes he can fly the TARDIS in real life.

Its hard not to take your point about the downright nastiness of fans and the double standards about the money everyone makes from Big Finish and convention appearances, etc, but I hate to think of this in that light. I only participate in limited fandom where the fans are friendly (here being one of them) and I can help (I used to be a Loose Cannon dubber long ago.)

Sure, there was a vocal minority of fans who believed as you described, but I can't help but think as I watch this that all the participants just wanted in on the act. Even Steven Moffat gets some great stuff to do, which is clearly more fun than having to write the main show itself. So, is the spirit here one of cheapness or crassness, because I don't know that anyone made any money per se out of it? To me this is almost a metaphor ... a bit like saying "Hey, all of us are stuck in the sodding Time Vortex ... without Tom."

I adore this, and almost considered purchasing the complete Matt Smith series on Blu-Ray just to have this. Ultimately, I just couldn't bring myself to spend the money on buying Series 5-7 again just to have this special, but I live in hope that it will one day be released again in a more affordable way.

I've never really bought the argument that the previous Doctors couldn't have played a larger role in the anniversary year, though. Perhaps it would have been overkill in the special itself, but having his previous incarnations making brief cameos throughout the latter half of series 7 would have made for a nice arc leading up to the special.

I do love the ultimate joke - that the old Doctors do appear after all, just hidden under sheets in the Undergallery. (Uber-nerds who have seen it a few times will spot that Matt says something different in that bit to what's in the episode, but shh we can pretend they actually were under there!)

Perhaps the thing to remember is not "Not All Fans," but rather "Yes, All Doctors."

Because even if 99% of fans are lovely, it only takes one to really ruin an actor's day. And it's up to the other 99% not to be defensive that we're not like that, but rather supportive of the actors who can't know in advance which one fan is going to be the one on the attack.

I think that's Phil's point; that there are points to be made about nasty fans and that professional actors do, in fact, need to be paid for acting, but this isn't that, it's a bunch of ex-Doctors doing something just because it's fun.

Oh my goodness, yes. Certainly I feel like I owe it to guests at a convention to be polite and understanding and respectful of their boundaries, because I don't know what the person in front of me was like and I don't know what they've had to put up with. I've never had a professional attendee be rude to me, and in fact I've seen some extraordinary displays of grace and charm (we have a Harlan Ellison story that was absolutely worth the price of attendance at the con as well as the plane tickets to get there) but I know enough about bad fan behavior to understand how they might feel like the fans are a bit much at times.

Well, in our case it was a Harlan story where he was witty and charming and very polite under possibly trying circumstances. We were attending a reading of his, and due to a mix-up we had no childcare and were forced to bring our five-year old along.

She behaved generally well, but at one point after Harlan went up and down the aisles chatting with the audience, that apparently blurred the lines between "sit quietly" and "talk to people" enough that she jumped up and, before we could catch her, she ran to the front and told Harlan Ellison, legendary curmudgeon and poor tolerator of fools, "You're silly!"

Harlan sighed. "And all this time I thought I was profound." And then he did his goldfish impression for her while we gathered her up and took her back to our seat.

Of course we all wanted the Twelve Doctors, or Thirteen, or whatever, but that was never going to happen in a real or successful way. Or in a ratings viable way. It happened for fans in the only ways possible; The E-Shorts novellas, The 50th Anniversary Novels republished, Prisoners of Time comic series across the whole year, The 11 Doctor Audio Specials, and Big Finish chimed in with Light at the End and a raft of other call-backs.

My family watched Day of the Doctor together at the movies, ages 5, 13, 16 (all boys) my wife 39 and me (46), and then again on television the next day in 2D. It's the first Doctor Who episode my wife has ever watched twice, same for the 13 year old. They are the very definition of 'casual fans'. For the record, neither has seen the final of Series 8 yet, due to other commitments, and neither feel they are missing anything. But they would like to catch up before Series 9, if they can find the time. All (apart from the 5 yo) have watched Doctor Who on broadcast since the '05 comeback.

No one but me has seen or made any attempt to engage with the other 50th media I listed above, despite it all being purchased at great expense and laid around the house like cocaine rock-star's house party at. That's it; just one of five in the family. Include in this list my mum and dad. Both in their 70s, and regular watchers of Doctor Who since mid Hartnell. Mum still loves it, and will watch repeats on the telly, dad gives it a once over on broadcast (probably just for old time's sake, and so he can have something to chat with me about). Neither of them, even though I raved about all the extras available, wanted anything to do with the old series celebration stuff.

So one out of Seven. (There's a reference to some chick in a body suit there I think, from one of the many Trek things; could be wrong though)

As a piece of modern broadcast Television, Day of the Doctor could not be anything other than what it was. Of the seven family members I've listed above, only one got goose bumps at the first utterance of the Curator. And had tears in his eyes through the whole scene. No one else in my immediate family even worked out who he was, at all. In fact the wife complained about the strange interlude, and asked 'who was that meant to be? It was, for them, simply a confusing break in the story.

Next day, I got a call from mom asking if that old bloke at the end was Tom Baker. I confirmed it was and she shouted, 'I told you so' to my dad, who simply grunted in acknowledgement. Big impact there on a pair of avid viewers of the show for the last forty-eight years!

I simply loved Five(ish) Doctors. Every reference, every nod, every.... thing. Especially the RTD epilogue, and the classic.vs.new-who incidental music gag. The self deprecating humour on display from all of the leads, including McGann, and how could you miss John Barrowman in your write up! The whining of the past doctors in the new set (turned it into a helicopter). And I was the only one in my family to watch it all (several times). The 16 year-old made it about halfway through, got distracted by his phone and wandered off.

After all that, finally, my point: The Five(ish) Doctors exists because of the mutually dependent bond between the classic die-hard fans and the classic die-hard doctors. We need their input to keep our childhood memories alive, to keep us young... and they need us in whatever small way to pay the mortgage, put food on the table and keep working, to feel appreciated (between blockbuster movie projects, of course). And like many symbiotic species, they don't necessarily have to like each other, or even have anything much in common, but one would struggle to exist without the other.

And so... as I don't post much; thank you Phil. Thank you for four years of something new and brilliant. I didn't think there was anything else to be said about Doctor Who, and you have proven that wrong, three times a week. I came on board a couple of months after the mini brew-ha over Celestial Toymaker post and have been reading with wrap attention ever since.

And to all the brilliant commenters, those I agreed with and those I didn't, I have never read and interacted with a more involved, intelligent and erudite bunch over such a prolonged period. It's been an absolute pleasure.

"Already The Day of the Doctor tangibly had Eccleston’s absence hanging over it ... in the obvious but totally ignored question of why the Moment apparently deemed the Doctor’s next incarnation inadequate for the task of preventing the Doctor from using it."

I think it's a bit of a red herring in Day that the reason the Moment is showing the War Doctor his Christmas Carol future selves is because they're the men born out of the Time War. That's what he comes to believe is its point after the UNIT/Zygon treaty, that these men will be heroes if he goes ahead and pushes the button, but it isn't the Moment's purpose for involving Ten and Eleven at all.

WAR DOCTOR: She didn't just show me any old future! She showed me exactly the future I needed to see!THE MOMENT: Now you're getting it.

They were the two incarnations who happened to deal with Zygons and their stasis cube technology. It was showing them a "how," not a "why." Now the Ninth Doctor's omission is just because he's an incarnation like 12 and 17 and 45 and so on who didn't have anything to do with stasis cubes. If it was just "I need to show you what a post-Time War Doctor is like and the man you will become blah blah blah," it would be odd for the Moment to exclude the man he immediately turns into.

Obviously, having all Doctors in a central role would've been a bit much, but I would've been happier had Davison, Baker and McCoy appeared in cameo roles at the end (although I don't think a museum can have four curators, can it?).

Then again, I do have issues with no McGann or Eccleston, plus some others, but I don't want to rant. I think the trouble is ranting appears to be the way that certain fans get noticed. I thought the 50th was okay, but not special enough. I certainly did enjoy a lot of moments from it though, so I'm not saying it was completely rubbish, as many often do. Just think there could have been more done.

I think the word is schadenfreude. The enjoyment of someone else's discomfort. Moffat's agony here was certainly the most hilarious event of the anniversary but that whole aftershow was a train wreck. All those poor actors attempting forced bonhomie at the bar in the background while being ritually humiliated and forced to participate in a rigged quiz that would proclaim K9 to be the best companion. It was like the worst convention ever. I seriously thought Janet Fielding and Bernard Cribbins might start a popular revolt and wrest the show out of the hands of whatever work-experience production assistants had been left carrying the can. Then One Direction happens. Fittingly, as whoever's was in charge of this 'aftershow' seemed to be under the impression that Dimensions in Time was the bar to aim for, it's like a vision of a Doctor Who Hell. A One Direction live link up that becomes a temporal recursive occlusion.

The serious observation to be made here, I suppose, is that despite the success of the RTD revival, the Moffat continuation and the popular support for the anniversary itself, the BBC still don't quite know what to do with Doctor Who and often default to treating it like a slightly tipsy eccentric aunt who is likely to do something embarrasing and so is packed of into the kids party room at family get togethers.

Eventually and inevitably the show will have another forced hiatus and I think Moffat here was squirming in horror at the vision of Christmas Future he suddenly found himself in.

I had not thought of that -- that Ten and Eleven were involved simply because they were the two Doctors working opposite ends of "the Zygon case," and thus, the only ones who could help War Doctor think of using the cubes. However I am still in love with my own pet theory: that the Moment really was Bad Wolf Rose reaching back in time to undo the end of the Time War, which also had the effect of imprinting the Doctor on Rose Tyler's face just hours before he regenerated into Nine.

I don't really agree with the reading that "inherent ugliness ... fuels this"

To me, "For the Fans" is just as silly as the importance of "Sex Farm" being number 1 in Japan as a reason for Spinal Tap to reform. My reading here isn't just how silly actors and fans can be, but how silly Doctor Who has become to its more core cult audience. We are all, as Spinal Tap, "trapped in a state of arrested development."

The Afterparty was the most misguided thing since Dimensions in Time. Truly awful to watch. Although there was, for me, one great highlight: seeing Jackie Lane in the montage of people sending messages. Considering how much she's distanced herself from the role, I found her little message to be so heartwarming and lovely. I kinda zoned out for the most of the rest of the show.

Ah yes, Jackie Lane's contribution was lovely and totally made up for the cringingly misjudged reaction of (traditional Doctor Who nemesis) Graham Norton on his chat show around a year earlier, interviewing Matt Smith and Karen Gillan after a jaunt to the States and viewing their convention pics. Norton upon spotting, amongst a crowd of fans an impressively accurate Dodo cosplayer (red and black op-art mini dress and peaked cap), screaming "WHO'S THAT!?" and then doing his irritating "hyuk hyuk!" sneering laugh. I wish I could find a link, it'll be on Youtube somewhere, the worst bit is Smith and Gillan playing along, having no idea who the girl was meant to be either.

To be fair, it seems Smith and Gillan have rather short memories of their Comic Con experiences, since Smith didn't recognize a fan look-alike he'd met in San Diego when the look-alike popped up to sit in the Red Chair on Graham Norton that November.

And to continue on the awfulness of Graham Norton, I listened to his radio show he presented from the 50th Anniversary celebrations at the London Excel. Sadly he sounded rather patronising and only half interested in the subject matter.

I have come to regard Graham Norton as the single greatest villain in the history of Who. He's never threatened to take over the earth or killed a companion or anything, but he started ruining the show on the night of the first episode in 2005 (his clueless whining brogue breaking in over what was supposed to be a tense scene where Rose is menaced by Autons in the basement) and, two Doctors later, his stupid animated little body danced across the screen at the climactic cliff-hanging conclusion of (I think) The Time Of Angels. It's like there's some kind of conspiracy between him and the BBC deliberately to fuck up broadcast of the show whenever they think they can get away with it and blame "technical problems".